Word: yusuf
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Under Mattresses. As remarkable and diverse as their depositors, Lebanon's wily bankers come from all levels of a highly mobile society in which poor men get rich quick but seldom vice versa. Though they primarily serve the Moslem world, most are Christians. The giant among them, Yusuf Bedas, 51, began as a moneychanger operating out of two small rooms in 1948; now his Intra Bank has assets of more than $1 billion and branches from New York to Nigeria. He is building another branch on Paris' Champs Elysées, last week bought a four-story Rome...
...customers make demands that try the most patient bankers. One sheik withdrew $6,000,000 overnight because his banker could not procure a belly dancer he had admired. And Kuwait's skeptical Sheik Abdullah al Mubarak, who stored $25 million in cash and suitcases full of stocks at Yusuf Bedas' bank, once ordered that his stocks be delivered instantly to his mountain mansion; he carefully counted them one by one, then airily waved them back to the bank. But when he tried to tell Bedas how to run his business, the banker exploded: "Take your money...
...organization, trained a staff and carefully picked efficient routes. Today Middle East has a predominantly modern fleet that includes 12 jet and turboprop planes for scheduled routes, six DC-3s and a DC-4 in reserve. Backed by Beirut's Intra Bank and its shrewd chairman, Yusuf Bedas (who owns a 55% share of the line), Middle East has also ordered two Concorde supersonic transports...
...Yusuf Bedas' own flamboyant history supports his thesis. Since 1948, when the creation of Israel ended Palestine's role as banker to the Middle East, free-enterprising Lebanon has been inundated by a flood of investment money from oil-rich Saudi princes and from wealthy Egyptians, Syrians and Iraqis frightened by the increasingly socialist policies of their own governments. Riding this tide, brash, resolute Yusuf Bedas in ten years of frenetic expansion has built Intra from scratch into Beirut's largest bank, with capital of $10,000,000 and 16 branches in Europe and the Arab world...
...clined to look askance at this headlong expansion and at the fact that Bedas, de spite the growing complexity of Intra's operations, continues to run it as a one-man show. But last week, as he hopped from Rome to Paris to London inspecting his empire, cocky Yusuf Bedas pooh-poohed any suggestion of overextension...